


homesick for a clock

by catharsia



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Artist Grantaire, Historically Accurate Paint Colours, M/M, Post-Barricade, Unhappy Ending, but don't worry because there's only one bed, this is the first exr fic i've ever written without a coffee shop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:48:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28030428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catharsia/pseuds/catharsia
Summary: The stranger doesn’t reply, simply glaring up at him with clouded but bristling eyes. He’s still shivering, and his breathing is so shallow that Grantaire wonders if he’s trying to will himself back into unconsciousness.‘Jesus Christ, go and fucking die then,’ he says, throwing up his hands. ‘You’re taking up very valuable space on my couch.’or:november, 1832. impoverished artist grantaire finds a beautiful stranger freezing to death in the street, and nurses him back to health. he's also quite desperate for the man to become his new muse.
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Kudos: 25





	homesick for a clock

When Grantaire first sees him, he almost doesn’t see him at all.

Grantaire’s walking as quickly as possible, after all. It’s only early November, but snow is falling over Paris. It started in small cold drops, at first, that did little more than turn the streets wet and slick with melting ice; but now real flakes are landing - thick and crystalline and beginning to settle. Grantaire would be stopping to admire them, if the light wasn’t so faint, and the night wasn’t so close above him.

And it’s fucking cold. His fingers are buried deep inside his coat pockets, because he’s forgotten to bring gloves; so when his damp curls begin plastering themselves against his forehead, he shakes his head like a dog in the vague hope of dislodging them without his hands. It’s probably only due to this that he catches sight of - what the hell _does_ he even catch sight of? Some irregularity in the shadows across the street; something that niggles at his brain like a poorly painted light source.

He glances at it, then looks away - then turns to look again, coming to a halt.

There’s a woman curled under the high rise of the church wall, her body a shadowy smear against its dark stones. There’s a coat drawn around her, and her face is tilted downwards; through the swirling snow, all Grantaire can make out of her body is her hair, still visibly golden across the gloom and the distance.

Another one of Paris’s penniless. Grantaire’s sentimental, but still, he can’t exactly help all of them. He barely makes enough as an artist for himself to live on; he doesn’t have the spare change to go buying food and shelter for random women on the street. Especially if they aren’t going to survive the winter anyway, as this one very well might not - or even the night.

The street is oddly silent, muffled beneath the swirling of the snow. Grantaire glances around; as far as the eye can see (which isn’t particularly far), there’s no one out except him and this barely-substantial girl.

It’s really not his problem.

It’s also really fascinating how the light reflects off her hair, though. He wonders how he’d render her; he’d have to paint her from afar, just like this, because the rest of her body is so obscured - a charcoal shape against charcoal brick in the midst of a painted scene of blues and greys. Very economical; about three shades of paint, all of which he has supplies of, and the coal can always just be pulled from the fireplace.

Then he realises that he’s proposing stealing someone’s likeness for money and leaving them to probably die, which sounds so essentially horrible that his feet start moving, trudging through the smooth pale street towards the girl. His shoes meet slippery stones beneath the thin layer of settled snow, and he slides a little, forcing himself to slow. His nose feels like it’s about to freeze solid on his face, and his hands and toes aren’t far behind.

Then he’s in front of the woman, just far enough that a respectful distance can be maintained. ‘Madam?’

The street is silent, and yet his voice barely travels, swallowed up by the snow just like everything else. She doesn’t stir.

‘Madam?’ he says, loudly.

Fuck, is she dead? He’s used to Paris; has seen his fair share of people starving and bereft; would term himself a pretty cynical man, but the prospect that the woman is not a woman but a corpse is a little too much for him to handle. With that in mind, he throws decorum away and crouches down at her side, grasping her shoulder and shaking it. Up close, she’s broader than expected; her bones, under her clothes and his (very numb) hand, feel prominent but not overly delicate. He shakes her again, and that’s when her head tips sideways, and he sees her face.

Actually, _his_ face. Fine-boned and and alarmingly thin and disarmingly _pretty_ , but unmistakably that of a young man. His hair really is long and shockingly blond, though; the shelter the wall provides has kept off the worst of the snow, and his head is so yellow-gold it almost seems unnatural under Grantaire’s hand.

Also, he’s _still unconscious._ This really isn’t the time for an artistic epiphany.

‘Monsieur?’ Grantaire tries, practically shouting into his face. Still no response. He fumbles his way down the stranger’s arm and locates his hand; picks up a floppy wrist and attempts to locate a pulse. His fingers are too desensitised to be able to find if it’s there or otherwise, but the man is still _warm_ \- relatively. Either alive or very recently dead.

‘Fuck,’ Grantaire mutters. He carefully peels the man’s body back from the wall, cradling him so that his skull is nowhere near brick, then curls his own hand into a fist and slams it into the man’s cheekbone.

Blue eyes fly open, and Grantaire barely has time to shift backwards before the stranger is flailing, face flickering from blank to confused to terrified to _furious._ His own hand comes flying up into a punch that’s weak but surprisingly well-directed, and Grantaire only just avoids it landing squarely on his jaw.

‘Calm _down_ !’ he says - well, borderline shouts - raising his hands and scrambling to his feet. ‘You weren’t responding! I had to wake you up. Jesus Christ, I thought you were _dead._ ’

The stranger stops attempting to lunge for Grantaire’s ankles, although whether that’s due to pacification or physical exhaustion, Grantaire can’t tell. He drops back to the ground a small distance away, cautiously. Shit, what does he do now?

‘Do you have a home? Someone to go to?’

‘Nng,’ says the stranger. He looks as if he’s struggling to form words. Grantaire leans in slightly closer, to hear him better, and discerns that his lips are worryingly blue.

‘ _Nhhg,’_ says the stranger, eyes somehow flashing. Then they flash upwards, brilliant irises tipping backwards into his skull, and he slumps over himself, a lock of hair landing centimetres from Grantaire’s hands.

Grantaire looks to the heavens, and finds that they are entirely obscured by a blanket of grey by now: snow, falling in darkness. Cloying flakes hit his cheeks and mouth and eyes, and he blinks furiously, tilting his chin back towards earth.

The stranger will certainly be dead by morning.

...if he stays here. Grantaire wonders if he technically will have murdered him, by leaving him on the ground. Something that could even be considered for the category of _technical murder_ is probably fairly terrible.

Grantaire squeezes his eyes shut, and takes a deep breath. 

  
  


\----------------------

  
  
  


The man lies on Grantaire’s couch for two days and another two nights without waking. Outside, it snows and it snows. Grantaire forces him awake once (this time, without hitting him), to pour snow-water down his throat and make sure he isn’t irretrievably comatose. He changes all his clothes, other than his undergarments - into the only spare set of clothes Grantaire himself owns. He’s mildly horrified, despite himself, at the concavity of the man’s torso. 

Grantaire’s downstairs neighbour, a baker, visits bringing bread. He opens the door only a crack to accept it, so that she won’t catch sight of the stranger passed out on his couch. She’s lovely, but she talks and she talks. Grantaire doesn’t need his vile landlord barging in once the snow has melted, demanding extra rent - for the privilege of sharing his living space with an unpaid guest.

Two nights after Grantaire rescues him, the man wakes up of his own accord.

He’s shivering, as he’s been shivering in his sleep; Grantaire slides off his own bed and pads across the floor, cautious. The man is trying to sit up, he thinks - bracing his arms against the couch, but he’s clumsy and delirious and they aren’t holding his weight anyway, too racked with shaking. 

‘Stop that,’ says Grantaire clearly, pushing his shoulders down, and he collapses pitifully easily against Grantaire’s threadbare cushion. ‘Just lie still.’

‘Fuck’ff,’ mumbles the stranger.

‘“ _Fuck off”?_ Really? If I’d fucked off when I found you, _you’d_ have fucked off into the fucking afterlife, you fucker.’

The stranger doesn’t reply, simply glaring up at him with clouded but bristling eyes. He’s still shivering, and his breathing is so shallow that Grantaire wonders if he’s trying to will himself back into unconsciousness.

‘Jesus Christ, go and fucking die then,’ he says, throwing up his hands. ‘You’re taking up very valuable space on my couch.’

The stranger says something indecipherable, and Grantaire leans in closer, his nose hovering inches above his face so he can hear.

‘Not exactly… valuable.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ says Grantaire. Fucking unbelievable. ‘How are you in a position to criticise? Your couch is apparently a churchyard wall.’

The stranger closes his eyes. Grantaire frowns, and slaps lightly at his face, where the place Grantaire punched him is already beginning to turn yellow.

‘Stay awake. You’ve been enjoying my _magnificent_ hospitality for days, and I don’t even know your name, Monsieur. You owe me that, at least.’

The stranger’s eyes are still shut, long lashes casting pale spidery shadows over his cheeks. Grantaire wishes he would reopen them, mostly for medical reasons. ‘Don’t… have one.’

Grantaire shakes his head. ‘Everyone has a name. Jacques? Claude? Bernard? I like Bernard. I’ll call you that, if you don’t tell me.’

The stranger’s eyes pull open, at that, and Grantaire feels a wave of relief he can’t quite verbalise. ‘Enjolras,’ he says, and then coughs, violently enough that the motion of it jerks his head up off the couch.

‘Angel-what?’

‘ _Enjolras.’_

‘Well, that’s ridiculous,’ murmurs Grantaire. He realises how close his head is hovering to the stranger’s - _Enjolras’s -_ and pulls back, sitting on his heels. Across the room, the fire flickers beneath the grate. 

‘Um, are you hungry?’

Enjolras’s eyes are fixed on the ceiling. Grantaire leans back over him and finds that _fixed_ is alarmingly literal; he’s staring off into space, expression blank again, and his shivering is only growing worse.

Grantaire feels his own lips physically twist. He climbs off the couch and goes to his own bed, gathering up the coverlet. Moving back towards the other side of the room, he drops it onto Enjolras’s prone body, and cocoons it around him as best he’s able, then grips the end of the couch and drags it closer to the fire. Its metal feet make a horrible scraping sound across the floor.

Enjolras’s eyes are closed again. Grantaire sighs, then returns to his own bed, peeling back the bottom sheet. There are some fairly disgusting brown stains on the mattress, not to mention dead insects, so he brings the sheet and his pillows over to the fire, and curls on the rug at the foot of the couch.

He doesn’t sleep.

  
  
  


\--------------------

  
  
  


Paris has been cloaked in snow for four days. Grantaire emerges from his freezing little bathroom in the morning to discover Enjolras sitting up, blankets pulled down to his waist. Grantaire’s impractical brain chooses this moment to register that the borrowed clothes are far too large upon his malnourished body, and he looks almost comically small, buried beneath the billowing shirt and the coverlet and his own tangled, streaming hair. It’s longer than any man’s that Grantaire has ever seen; no wonder he mistook him for a woman, when it was practically all he could see of him.

‘You’re awake,’ Grantaire says, blinking.

‘Yes.’

Enjolras’s voice sounds entirely different all of a sudden, not muffled and confused anymore but clear and incisive; still weak, but it’s enough of a change that it could be coming from a different person. Grantaire moves around the couch so he can examine him. 

He’s not shivering anymore. His skin is wan and mildly grey; his eyes are tired; but he definitely no longer looks in danger of death, the way he’s been looking ever since Grantaire stumbled across him in the street.

‘Who are you?’

Oh _._ Yeah, probably a reasonable question.

‘My name is Grantaire. I’m a painter. We’re in the tenth arrondissement; I found you collapsed a few streets away and brought you here.’

‘Why?’ asks Enjolras quietly, and coughs.

A less reasonable question, and one that Grantaire has no good answer for. He shrugs one shoulder. ‘I don’t know. I have a heart, or something.’

Enjolras looks entirely sceptical of that, but thanks him anyway.

‘De rien,’ says Grantaire quickly. He glances up and down Enjolras’s body and makes the assessment he can probably stand. ‘Do you want to bathe? There’s water for a bath, through there.’

‘Thank you,’ Enjolras repeats. He extricates himself from the sheets with some effort, and pushes himself to his feet, biting his lip with concentration. Grantaire gets the impression he isn’t going to ask for help, so wordlessly offers him his shoulder for support, and they slowly move towards the bathroom.

The downstairs neighbour drops off more bread while Enjolras takes his bath. Grantaire hopes he isn’t drowning and places the bread on the table, retrieving a couple of knives and a bottle of wine from the cupboard. He wanders over to the window and throws it open as wide as he can, scraping a bucket against the roof tiles. When he pulls it back inside, it’s laden with snow. 

The world is white outside, suffocated and smothered with the same blank fabric, like a painted canvas rubbed clean. As Grantaire watches, more flakes are drifting lazily through the sickly yellow sky. 

There’s a sound behind him, and he pulls the window shut, ducking his head down under the rafters. Enjolras has come back through the bathroom door. He’s tied his hair into a low knot at the nape of his neck, golden strands soaked through and turned pale brown, and his skin is all scrubbed clean. He’s braced against the wall, but he’s still standing. Grantaire’s gaze traces over his body, filling in his hair with strokes of mustard and then paler strokes rounding over those, until his whole head shines - a dark background, of course, in the Italian style -

‘Do you want something to eat?’ Grantaire asks, and something sparks within Enjolras’s eyes.

It’s kind of upsetting to watch him eat the bread. He devours each slice with the intensity of one of Grantaire’s old girlfriends, who used to eat and eat until she was sick, ravenously and without regard to taste, but would still hold back between bites, trying to appear refined in polite company.

‘I won’t keep imposing on you,’ says Enjolras abruptly. He pauses as he coughs, then finishes, ‘I can leave today.’

Grantaire blinks. ‘Hold on, what? No, you fucking can’t.’

Enjolras frowns. Something strange comes into his eyes that takes Grantaire a moment to place - a wariness. Oh, Christ, now he probably thinks Grantaire is some kind of serial kidnapper who isn’t going to let him leave his apartment.

‘I _mean,’_ says Grantaire quickly, ‘that you literally, physically can’t. You barely managed to walk from the bathroom to the table, and now you’re shivering again. There’s snow everywhere, and if you just go back out there today, you’ll die in a ditch and your stay on my _very valuable_ couch will be for nothing.’

Enjolras, who is indeed shivering again, clenches his jaw. ‘The snow will take days to clear. I can’t just -’

‘You _can_ just,’ says Grantaire. ‘It’s fine, really.’

‘I don’t have any way of repaying you - for the food and the space.’

Yeah, Grantaire had come to that conclusion. ‘If you mention _paying_ me again, I’ll punch you. You were dying, and this isn’t exactly an elite hotel.’

Enjolras’s (very defined) jaw moves stiffly and silently. ‘Again,’ he says, finally.

‘What?’

‘You’ll punch me _again_. I haven’t forgotten about the last time.’

‘ _Oh,’_ says Grantaire, and finds himself laughing. ‘Fuck, yeah. Sorry about that, but I wasn’t sure if you were dead.’

‘And _that_ was how you chose to check?’

‘It worked!’

‘You’re an idiot.’

‘An idiot who saved your life by punching you.’

‘I do wish you hadn’t,’ Enjolras mutters. Grantaire’s breath catches, unsure if that’s a joke or not, but he’s still smiling. (Zinc White for his teeth-)

  
  
  


\-----------------------

  
  
  
  


Enjolras’s condition continues to improve. A week after his rescue he’s regained full functional mobility; he ducks smoothly into the bathroom as Grantaire’s neighbour comes to the door to deliver food.

‘Bloody ridiculous how long this snow is lasting,’ she comments, and Grantaire is inclined to agree. The whole city remains coated in a swathe of white, like some particularly fine blend of flour has been spilled everywhere.

Which does mean that Enjolras can’t go anywhere just yet. But it’s fine. The food they have can stretch to two. This is helped by Enjolras not eating much; Grantaire suspects it’s hurting his pride and conscience to take Grantaire’s food without payment, so he takes the bare minimum necessary for survival. Otherwise, Enjolras spends his days reading (Grantaire owns precisely three books, which Enjolras consumes with much less restraint than the bread); doing floor exercises to try and build up his strength; and talking to Grantaire.

They talk a lot, actually; about snow and spaghetti and society and Sartre. Enjolras turns out to be exceptionally well-read; Grantaire’s almost positive he’s university educated, and probably raised in affluence, judging by his conversation and accent.

They never talk about Enjolras’s personal life. Grantaire is itching to know more about it, about him - who he is and why he ended up destitute and half-dead outside a churchyard. But it would be a horrible thing to ask about, and so he attempts to curb his natural curiosity and steers valiantly clear of that topic.

After eight days, Enjolras asks what’s in the third room of Grantaire’s apartment. It’s hard to overstate how cramped their space is, really: a main room where they sleep and eat and live; a bathroom that’s really more the size of a cupboard; and a third door, which Grantaire has been keeping shut for the past week. It’s understandable Enjolras is curious.

Still, that doesn’t mean his secret is something Grantaire is particularly excited to share.

‘You’re an artist _?’_ asks Enjolras, staring around at the canvases and boards stacked around what Grantaire likes to generously term his “studio”. ‘Grantaire, these... these are - '

Grantaire is in fact mainly a portrait painter, and it’s one of these portraits that Enjolras is currently eyeing - not one of his fancy commissions, but a painting of a young girl; the sister of a friend, all wispy blonde hair and wide eyes, staring out of the canvas with a delicate balance of fear and interest etched across her face. It’s probably the best piece of work he’s done all year, not that competition is stiff.

‘Thanks,’ he says.

Enjolras is turning, eyes fractionally widening as he takes in the stacks of paintings and pigments, and the clean brushes piled around Grantaire’s tiny and dirty water basin. He stops again at a nude on a panel of wood; a small commission painting that’s yet to be framed; an attempt at a landscape, close to the Seine. Grantaire shifts, simultaneously flattered and mildly uncomfortable.

‘Would you paint me?’

Grantaire stares uncomprehendingly at Enjolras.

Fuck, yes, Grantaire would paint him - wants to paint him - is kind of hopelessly fascinated by him. His long golden hair and his dark lips and straight nose, and the sickly tint of shadow that works its way through all of them; physical perfection stained by some kind of deep-rooted decay. Adonis, a god dying. As art goes, he’s practically ready-made.

‘It could make you money, couldn’t it?’ Enjolras continues. ‘I assume you can’t really get to your usual models in this weather, so it could help.’

_Oh,_ Grantaire realises. Enjolras thinks modelling for him can be a way of paying him back, for the food and board, which - depending on how well the resulting paintings go, it very well could be. It’s a sound proposition all round. Money for Grantaire and guilt relief for Enjolras. Very reasonable.

Enjolras’s eyes are fixed upon him expectantly. Grantaire idly focuses upon them in return. _Cobalt Blue. Won’t need to mix in as much white as I initially thought. Quite dark, actually - more the sea than the sky. Bleeding out Viridian around the edges._

‘Sure,’ he says, like he’s been working through the thought. ‘Why not?’

  
  


\--------------------

  
  


‘Up a bit,’ says Grantaire.

The lines of Enjolras’s neck tense and elongate, and he tilts his chin a few degrees higher. Grantaire has pulled open the window behind him, and a blue-yellow soft-sharp light casts his face into a shallow silhouette.

It’s bewitching. Also, freezing.

Grantaire reaches down to take up a smaller paintbrush, and pulls his coat further around himself. He doesn’t have a second one, so Enjolras is just clad in his (Grantaire’s) shirt and slacks, but if he’s cold, he’s showing no signs of it. In fact, he’s somewhat supernaturally still.

Grantaire pauses to take a long drink of wine (this new bottle tastes mostly like dirt, but he isn’t picky). Then he dips his brush back into the same pool of blue-green he’s been using for Enjolras’s left eye, and sweeps it just below the jutting line of his cheek. For a moment it hangs, fresh and ludicrously bright against the white-pink-yellow of the rest of the face, but then he begins to blend it out, teasing it into a softer shape, and it starts to settle.

Enjolras coughs, his hand flying up to obscure his mouth; coughs again, then returns to exactly the same position as before.

He really is excellent at this. His back is perfectly straight, head unmoving, and Grantaire’s suspicion that his parents were somewhat wealthy returns, because that kind of posture can only be taught, never natural. Grantaire lowers his brush for a moment, curiosity scratching at the front of his skull, and he wants to _ask,_ wants it badly.

‘The light is changing,’ says Enjolras quietly.

Grantaire looks up to the window and realises he’s correct. Their session has worn on into the afternoon, and the sky is shifting, turning purpling, like a bruise.

‘Shit, you’re right. Let’s leave it there for today. We should get the fire going.’

‘I’ll do it,’ says Enjolras, and slides off the couch. Grantaire gets up as well, and goes to the window to slide it closed. As he does so, something cold and wet lands on the back of his hand.

‘It’s snowing again,’ he calls.

He feels happy for a reason he doesn’t particularly want to examine, just yet.

  
  
  


\------------------------

  
  
  


Across the room, Enjolras is cutting pieces off their new loaf of bread, with a characteristic (and, Grantaire is fairly sure, subconscious) aggression. 

Inches from Grantaire's face, Enjolras is gazing directly at him, expression arch but simultaneously vulnerable. Grantaire's eyes roil over the curls of his hair; spill down his strong brow and nose and red lips, over his chin and long neck and then onto the place where his skin gives way to the dirty pale wood of the easel. 

It's the third painting he's completed of Enjolras now. All fairly quick; impressions of Enjolras's head and face, emotive and expressive in their way. 

Grantaire wants to do more. He doesn't quite know how to breach the topic of what he wants. 

As it happens (and perhaps this should be predictable, by now) Enjolras breaches it for him. 

'The other paintings I saw in your studio,' he says. ‘Most were full body portraits. If you want to do that with me, or want me to model nude - I'm fine with it.' 

And then he _bites his lip._ Grantaire swallows down hard. 

'If you're sure,' he says, and it's kind of hilarious that his voice manages to come out so - casual. Like he could take the offer or leave it. And maybe he's a terrible person, because Enjolras is prideful, and clearly wants to do as much as he can as a model because it’s the only way he can repay Grantaire for letting him stay; and Grantaire is probably taking unethical advantage of him. Or is he?

'Did you always want to be an artist?' 

'Pretty much,' says Grantaire honestly. 'It was one of the few things I was good at as a kid. The only thing, probably. And it was the last thing in the world my father wanted, so it had an inherent appeal.' 

'Sounds familiar,' says Enjolras dryly. He coughs, and takes a long sip of wine, head tilting back to drain his cup. 

Grantaire stares at him for a second. It's pretty much the closest Enjolras has come to telling him about his childhood - or about any of his life before he wound up freezing to death on a street corner. 

'What?' asks Enjolras. There's a flush of pink over his cheeks, and it might be from the wine. 

Grantaire realises Enjolras has caught him staring. There's really no point in pretending he hasn't been, now, so he just shrugs and holds his gaze. 'Got distracted.'

Enjolras's cheeks are more red than pink, now. Grantaire's fingers itch to paint him this way, rose and rouge tones daubed across his skin. He’s running low on Rose Madder; he’ll buy more once the snow is gone.

Enjolras coughs again, and Grantaire helpfully hands him the wine bottle for a refill. 

  
  


\----------------

  
  
  


'Shall we get started, then?' 

'Whenever you'd like,' says Grantaire, carefully. 

It's evening, because he’s found through experience that this eases people into their first time modelling nude: windows closed, room lit by flames that send shadows skittering across the highlights of their skin and leave some of it mercifully dressed by the dark. 

Enjolras is standing in front of the couch. He nods, catching his hands at the cuffs of his shirt. His eyes meet Grantaire's with some strange unbridled challenge, and then he sets his jaw and pulls it up over his head in one motion. 

His torso is thin, though not as desperately hollow as it had been when Grantaire changed his clothes that first night. He gives the impression of someone who's wasted away more than someone who's grown that way, unlike hundreds of others Grantaire has seen throughout the back streets of Paris. 

Enjolras's fingers slide towards his hips and over his trousers; they hang loose and it's easy for him to slide them down, along with his drawers. 

He steps, now fully nude, over to the couch, and Grantaire blinks hard to refocus. 'Okay, just lie down. Prop your arm up on the edge, and rest your head on your hand.'

Enjolras follows his directions, body poised long and low as an arrow, and Grantaire, managing to slip into his artistic mode probably a little too late, surveys his positioning critically. 

Something is just - 

'Can you take your hair down?' he asks, and Enjolras reaches a hand towards the nape of his neck. Then he's shaking his loose hair out, golden strands falling in waves across his chest and back and the couch, burning red-gold in the dim firelight. 

Grantaire's breath catches. 

'Good, that's good,' he manages, and picks a brush up off the easel stand. 

Enjolras's eyes seem nearly black in this light. His chest rises and falls, shallow but quick; his lips are ever so slightly parted. The lines of his legs, tall and unnaturally thin, seem unnaturally long in comparison to the rest of his body; Grantaire traces them from ankle to jutting knee to hip, then forces himself to refocus.

He picks up his palette, already thick with undried paint, and pushes his brush deep into a mound of pink-red paint at its very centre. 

The scent of the smoking fire fills his nose as inhales, and he shudders, suddenly chilled to the bone. 

**Author's Note:**

> all the paint colour names in this fic are accurate to the time period; unfortunately i spent about as much time finding those as i did on the rest of the historical accuracy for this fic, so please try to ignore all the probable huge historical inaccuracies. or yell at me about them in the comments, if you want.
> 
> if you enjoyed this chapter, please leave a comment too! this will probably only have about three parts and i have the rest of the outline planned, so i'm not making any promises about finishing it quickly but hopefully it should take less than five years.
> 
> xx


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